Literature in the News: Sylvia Plath’s Daughter Rebukes Feminists

I found this article interesting.  Frieda Hughes, who is the daughter of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, criticized the feminists who idolized her mother’s work but who condemned her father because of their belief that he was responsible for Plath’s suicide.  Here’s a quick background for those who are not familiar.  Plath and Hughes were young poets married to each other from 1956 to her death in 1963.  Sylvia Plath had a history of mental illness and suicide attempts, and finally did kill herself.  It is true Ted Hughes cheated on her and had a mistress, and five months before the suicide had separated from Plath.   With that, here is Frieda Hughes’ claim as published in The Telegraph:

The feminists who exploited Sylvia Plath's death to accuse her husband Ted Hughes of mistreating her committed an "abuse" and a "horrible form of theft", the couple's daughter has said.

Frieda Hughes, the oldest of Plath and Hughes' two children, said she had been "appalled" by the appropriation of her family's tragedy to suit a cause.

Appearing in her first ever television interview, she said she deplored the judgment of "outsiders" who mistakenly believed they had an insight into her family's life.

What I didn’t realize was that the mistress Hughes took up with, also eventually committed suicide.  From the article:

Her father, the former poet laureate Hughes, went on to a relationship with his mistress Assia Wevill, who killed herself and their child in the same way six years later.

The incidents, which left Hughes unable to write his Crow collection, was taken up by furious feminists, who idolised Plath and accused the poet of mistreating both women.

Crow, mentioned above, is perhaps Hughes’ most famous collection of his poems.  I am not knowledgeable enough oh the Plath/Hughes history to know how substantive the feminists’ charge are, but given Plath’s mental illness history I can’t see how Hughes is more than just a bad husband.  And Frieda Hughes is right, who can really know a relationship from the outside.  She is quoted:

Speaking in the documentary, to be broadcast on BBC Two, she said the links made between the two tragedies were a form of "abuse" in themselves.

"I was appalled that something that happened in 1963 could be carried forward," she told programme-makers.

"What an easy way out for somebody to think, yes, we’re right, we have got the real story, we know what really happened, and we are going to punish this complete stranger for something we weren’t around to witness, we know nothing about, but we’re the ones with the answer.

"For outsiders - because that’s what they are, outsiders - to make judgements that affect somebody in their life, for all of their life, is a sort of horrible form of theft.

"It’s an abuse."

The charges against Ted Hughes—he was even accused of outright murdering Plath—colored his entire career.  Plath unfortunately died young, so she never did reach her potential.  Hughes, who was already a more mature poet than Plath, on the other hand, developed into one of the leading British poets of his generation, even titled as the Poet Laureate of Britain, the feminists did all they could to destroy his career. 

Since I’m on the subject of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, let me give an example of their poetry.  First from Plath.  I’ve always thought highly of this poem, though I can’t completing comprehend it all.

Fever 103?

Pure? What does it mean?

 The tongues of hell

 Are dull, dull as the triple

Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus

 Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable

 Of licking clean

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.

 The tinder cries.

 The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle!

 Love, love, the low smokes roll

 From me like Isadora's scarves, I'm in a fright

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.

 Such yellow sullen smokes

 Make their own element. They will not rise,

But trundle round the globe

 Choking the aged and the meek,

 The weak

Hothouse baby in its crib,

 The ghastly orchid

 Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

Devilish leopard!

 Radiation turned it white

 And killed it in an hour.

Greasing the bodies of adulterers

 Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.

 The sin. The sin.

Darling, all night

 I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.

 The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.

Three days. Three nights.

 Lemon water, chicken

 Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone.

 Your body

 Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern --

My head a moon

 Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin

 Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you. And my light.

 All by myself I am a huge camellia

 Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up,

 I think I may rise --

 The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I

Am a pure acetylene

 Virgin

 Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim,

 By whatever these pink things mean.

 Not you, nor him.

Not him, nor him

 (My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) --

 To Paradise.

I’m not going to do a close analysis, but don’t get too hung up on understanding every line.  Bear in mind it’s a confessional poem, and unless you’re a Plath scholar (and I’m not) you probably won’t get the immediate situation.  Plus there are some obscure details which obfuscates the meaning.  For instance that “Isadora’s scarves” in line 12 refers to the dancer Isadora Duncan and her accidental strangling death with one of her scarves.  The poem goes from a sexual desire she considers sinful to being redeemed by it, from hell to paradise, from adulteress to virgin.  I’m not sure, but it could be the poem moves from the sexual sin to a blessed motherhood.

Ted Hughes is quite a different poet.  Here’s one from his Crow collection. 

Crow Communes

"Well," said Crow, "What first?"

God, exhausted with Creation, snored.

"Which way?" said Crow, "Which way first?"

God's shoulder was the mountain on which Crow sat.

"Come," said Crow, "Let's discuss the situation."

God lay, agape, a great carcass.

Crow tore off a mouthful and swallowed.

"Will this cipher divulge itself to digestion

Under hearing beyond understanding?"

(That was the first jest.)

Yet, it's true, he suddenly felt much stronger.

Crow, the hierophant, humped, impenetrable.

Half-illumined. Speechless.

(Appalled.)

The way I read Hughes is to see him as a sort of modern Romantic, idealizing nature and finding some hidden theology behind it.  I’m not overwhelmed by his poetry, despite his reputation.  He seems to me to be a lesser D. H. Lawrence, both in theme and style.  I’d rather read Lawrence.  

Literature in the News: Huckleberry Finn, Moral Delinquent

I came across this article, ‘“Huck Finn” is not about race: The real subtext of Twain’s masterpiece’ by Laura Miller published in Salon, that reaches the theme of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.  What’s surprising to me is that the author of the piece felt the need to explain it, as if this wasn’t widely known.  First Miller sets the context:

“A committee of the public library of your town have condemned and excommunicated my last book,” Mark Twain wrote to the secretary of Concord Free Trade Club in 1885, “and doubled its sales.” The book that was the object of what Twain called “this generous action,” was “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” a novel that would go on to be banned here and there in schools and libraries for the next 130 years.

Today, “Huckleberry Finn” is most often banned for its use of the N-word. (If there’s an argument for the legitimacy of Twain printing it, I can’t imagine one to justify its appearance in a humble book review, so I’ll be euphemizing it here.) But that came later; the book would not be censured for containing “passages derogatory to negroes” until 1957, when it was removed from the curricula of elementary schools in New York. Rather, disapproving librarians and critics in the late 19th century deplored “Huckleberry Finn” as “the veriest trash” for its favorable depiction of “a wretchedly low, vulgar, sneaking and lying Southern country boy.” And for its violence, which is considerable.

Yes, every era since the book was published had some criticism of which the impulse to ban it emerged.  But since the 1950s the perception has been that Twain was writing about race and that though his intentions were noble the black character of Jim ridicules African-Americans.  Indeed I had a black professor in college who said he was insulted by the portrayal.  Miller introduces into her piece a new book on the subject by Andrew Levy, Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and the Era that Shaped His Masterpiece.

“Huck Finn’s America” is about the context in which “Huckleberry Finn” first appeared and, eventually, how that context has shifted — or not. Levy’s overarching argument is that we misunderstand American culture in fundamental ways because we habitually forget our own past in favor of happy, gauzy nostalgia and/or fantasies of progress.

Miller summarizes Levy’s research:

In researching “Huck Finn’s America,” Levy immersed himself in newspapers and magazines from around the time Twain’s novel was written and published. What he found was that nobody, including Twain himself, considered race to be the primary theme of “Huckleberry Finn.” Rather, the novel emerged from and spoke to a society that was obsessed with wayward children, particularly boys, and most typically lower-class boys spurred to delinquency by the violent stories they read in dime novels. The papers were full of “stories of children committing crimes or dying young or killing each other,” to a degree that, Levy remarks, a modern reader would find “simply numbing.” In response to this perceived crisis, Americans were, for the first time, seriously discussing the establishment of a system of public education.

What I find surprising is that this is surprising to Miller and I suppose her readers.  First Twain is upfront right in the very novel himself when he tells us that Huck is an uncivilized delinquent in need of being taught.  Second, what constitutes civilizing is clearly at the core of the work.  Should I be surprised at Miller’s reaction?  Perhaps not.  Those of a particular ideology have an obsession with race, and academia has been swallowed up by that ideology, which has a distorting effect on understanding a work, for the past sixty years .  Levy appears (I haven’t read it) to have done great research to show the social context that the novel was written in.

What Huck Finn is about is the relationship between two people, a boy and an escaped slave, both uneducated, both uncivilized to the standards of Twain’s time, who through their relationship find that morality rests in the very natural world that harbors them, outside of church, state, and even family structure.  Perhaps we might consider that somewhat naïve, but the Romanticism of the 19^th century was a bit naïve, and the themes of Huckleberry Finn are square in the Romantic tradition.  No one should be surprised by the results of Levy’s research.